This paper addresses two main questions: (a) Can listeners assign values of perceived boundary strength to the juncture between any two words? (b) If so, what is the relationship between these values and various (combinations of) suprasegmental features. Three speakers read a set of twenty utterances of varying length and complexity. A panel of nineteen listeners assigned boundary strength valu...

Head movements are linked not only to symbolic gestures, such as head-nodding to represent “yes” or head-shaking to represent “no,” but also to the production of suprasegmental features of speech, such as stress, prominence, and other aspects of prosody. Recent studies have shown that head movements play a more direct role in the perception of speech. In this paper, we propose a novel method fo...

In tone languages, pitch variation is one of the primary cues to distinguish lexical meanings. Similar to consonants and vowels, lexical tones play a role in accessing to lexical information, but these segmental and suprasegmental features may have different roles in this process. In this study, we examine the priming effects of tones, consonants, and vowels in an auditory task of lexical decis...

Can the foreign accent of a speaker be recognized based on suprasegmental temporal information? For a perception experiment we created stimuli based on German sentences read by six French and six English speakers. These foreignaccented sentences were manipulated by (1) applying a lowpass filter with a cutoff frequency of 300 Hz and (2) applying the same lowpass filter and monotonizing F0. In a ...

Previous research has identified robust effects on segmental production of lexical factors like word frequency, predictability or neighborhood density. One question that remains unanswered is whether such lexical effects hold also at the suprasegmental level. This study investigates whether lexical factors such as usage frequency affect tone production in Cantonese. We recorded Cantonese monosy...

In order to better teach pronunciation to students, it is necessary to gain a better appreciation of the types of pronunciation patterns and issues that Japanese speakers encounter when attempting to speak in English. To highlight some of these issues, a sample dialogue between two Japanese learners was recorded and analyzed for segmental and suprasegmental features. The analysis revealed that ...

There has been a growing realization of the importance of authentic human interactions attendant to both first and second language learning. By contrast to L1 learners, the older L2 learner faces a greatly changed learning environment and more adult-oriented communicative opportunities, and must overcome loss of aural sensitivity and limited exposure to the prosodic systems of expressiveness ap...

Neuropsychologists have debated over whether the processing of segmental and suprasegmental units involves different neural mechanisms. Focusing on the production of Chinese lexical tones (suprasegmental units) and vowels (segmental units), this study used the adaptation paradigm to investigate a possible neural dissociation for tone and vowel production. Ten native Chinese speakers were asked ...

Text-to-Prosody systems based on the use of prosodic databases extracted from natural speech will be a key point for further development of new Text-to-Speech systems. This paper describes a system using such speech databases to generate the rhythm and the intonation of texts written in French. The system is based on a very crude chinks ’n chunks prosodic phrasing algorithm and on an automatic ...